![World Oceans Day 2023]()
World Oceans Day 2023
Dear supporters and friends,
Well we did it! Our Reefs of Hope prorgam was endorsed by UNESCO as an Ocean Decade Action in February!
This makes our work the very first UN endorsed climate change adaptation program focused on coral reefs! While the honor does not come with funding, it helps verify our work and certainly will help over the long term.
This comes at a time of severe record marine heat levels and coral bleacing on the Great Barrier Reef, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, Wallis and Futuna, and Samoa. And 2025 is expected to be even worse! We have volunteer workers on the ground in six Pacific Island countries, where active measures to secure heat adapted corals are happening.
The Reefs of Hope strategies include emergency measures to evacuate heat-adapted corals from the hottest parts of the reef where they have evolved, and out to cooler waters within the same reef systems. Reefs of Hope also empowers communities and resorts to become part of the solution in helping prevent local coral species extinctions, because these two sectors have the most to lose from coral reef collapse. https://oceandecade.org/actions/reefs-of-hope/
The operational assumptions of Reefs of Hope are quite simple:
1. The open ocean will remain under 33°C even in the worst case scenarios.
2. Some outer coral reef areas will continue to remain under 33-34°C during marine heat waves of the future.
3. Corals exist within hot pocket reefs that can withstand multiple days of 34°C and above unbleached.
4. If these heat adapted corals are left where they are, they will die when temperatures approach 38C, so moving these corals out into cooler water nurseries is a viable strategy to prevent their demise and to maintain genetic diversity.
5. Thermal resilience is complex, involving host, symbiotic algae, and probiotic bacteria, and the best way to secure these multiple factors is to move corals from within jeopardized hot pocket coral populations, wherever they still exist.
6. Time has run out. Could 2024 be our last chance to rescue the large amounts of genetic material required for the future of coral reefs?
We believe that standing by and watching in horror is not an option.
We have been moving corals from extremely shallow hot pocket reefs since 2019, and in 2023, our gene bank nursery of >200 coral genotypes reached 32C for several weeks, and peaked at 33C twice. But the hot pockets got much hotter. Art 33C, only 27 out of >200 genotypes of "super coral candidates" bleached, and were retired back to cooler reefs. In 2023, we went to Tuvalu to work with local partners to move several boatloads of corals from hot to cooler waters before the nation was hit with the most intense bleaching in their history, a condition-three bleaching. We will soon return to record whether the corals we moved survived, while those left behind perished.
For Kiribati, where stress levels in some areas reached severe 27 DHW in the past, causing a 95% coral die-off, the work involves searching for any surviving individuals, securing and propagating the corals, and then focusing on rebooting sexual reproduction. Some species are totally gone or have only one individual left, so resistant corals have been flown in from a nearby atoll. With the mass die-off of cortals recently experienced in Florida and the Caribbean last summer, the entire region might now need to be managed regionally, in order to reverse what amounts to a series of local extinctions. For perspective, the Caribbean region is comparable in size to the expansive area covered by Kiribati.
My way was paid to the Reef Resilience Symposium in Cairns Australia in April, where discussions on the mass coral bleaching crisis that is threatening the reefs. Great interest was generated and the talks are online. Since the Cairns meeting, I have been trying to inspire those who work on the Great Barrier Reef to actively visit their hot pocket reefs and to see what remains, to collect unbleached individuals early on as the waters cool, to protect them from predators within gene bank nurseries, and especially to carry out local translocation from hot to cool reef areas during the cool winter months, while there is still time. My talk on the Reefs of Hope strategies presented at the Reef Resilience Symposium in Cairns is online here: https://youtu.be/tVU4D1UE9a4?t=12212 I have since also drafted an emergency plan for the Cairns and Townsville sectors of the GBR, which has been well received by some.
With the thermal anomaly now becoming permanent, everything has changed. I believe that the very future of the planet is at stake. No other people at any time in history have been faced with such a man-made crisis. If people have caused the problem, then people must implement the solution. And we are on the front-line of action! While we can certainly be active in trying to stimulate change, we must be careful to not dissipate our energies by setting our greatest hopes on trying to transform a very broken and unmoving system. The Reefs of Hope endorsement puts us in a unique position and we must cherish that position. Corals for Conservation has now been placed on the leading edge of action to prevent a planetary collapse, because if we can succeed in saving coral reefs, we can succeed in saving the planet. https://youtu.be/-SEjHv_5CM8?t=29933
Thank you for your support!
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